From August, BT's Openreach unit will start installing super fast fibre connections rather than traditional copper phone lines at the Ebbsfleet site, owned by Land Securities. It will offer the lines to BT Retail and rival ISPs and media companies such as Carphone Warehouse's TalkTalk and BSkyB, on a wholesale basis, enabling these companies to provide a host of bandwidth-hungry services such as high definition TV and film downloads.

"Openreach will provide the basic infrastructure and service providers will have the opportunity to build their own services on the back of it," explained head of Openreach Steve Robertson.

Openreach – BT’s local access network business - today announced further details of its deployment of fibre at Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent. From August 2008, fibre-optic cable will be used instead of traditional copper to connect homes on Land Securities’ 1,000 acre new build project. Approximately 10,000 homes will be built at Ebbsfleet Valley, along with six million sq. ft of commercial space and three million sq ft of retail, leisure and community facilities.

From August, Openreach will offer industry a fibre based broadband product at Ebbsfleet Valley that can support data at speeds of up to 100Mbit/s – the fastest headline speed available to residential customers in the UK. This would allow multiple HDTV channels to be watched simultaneously, HDTV gaming, and near instant music downloads. Openreach will offer all its products on a wholesale basis to all UK communication providers allowing for competition at a retail level. BT already provides some 120,000 businesses across the country with fibre connections.

In the future BT would like to make greater use of fibre in suitable new build sites, and a significant opportunity is presented by the Government’s plan to build 3 million new houses by 2020. But this investment critically depends upon an agreement with Ofcom which is currently engaged in consultation about how best to extend the regulatory framework to accommodate future fibre deployment. All current regulation is based upon BT offering wholesale products over copper.

BT is also committed to increasing broadband speeds over copper, introducing services of up to 24 Megabits from Spring 2008.